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AIDS deaths, infections down: UN report

The UN said the numbers of AIDS deaths and infections have declined in the last decade, but new infections worldwide have far outpaced efforts to provide anti-retroviral treatment to patients.

UN health programs provided anti-retroviral treatment to an additional 1 million people last year, but in the same year a total of 2.5 million people became infected with the AIDS virus.

“Unless the international community takes immediate action to follow through on the pledges made to implement an exceptional response to HIV, the epidemic’s humanitarian and economic toll will continue to increase,” the UN said in an update report to be presented to the two-day UN General Assembly’s HIV/AIDS conference beginning tomorrow.

It calls for “strong, sustained political commitment and leadership” to fight the epidemic, which has killed more than 25 million people since AIDS was first isolated in the middle of the 1980s.

“True leadership is reflected in action, not words,” the report says.

The assembly session is called to review progress made since 2001, when the UN launched worldwide programs to try to halt the spread of the epidemic by 2015.

At the midpoint of the ambitious program, the UN said that progress has become “evident” in many regions but remains uneven across and even within countries.

Fighting HIV/AIDS is part of the Millennium Development Goals adopted by the assembly in 2000 to address the world’s health, education, infant and maternal mortality and gender equality.

The report says that an estimated 32.2 million people worldwide were living with HIV in December. But the annual rate of new infections appeared to have declined over the last decade, with 2.5 million new infections last year, down from 3.2 million infections in 1998.

Women represent half of all HIV infections among adults, with 61 per cent of them in Africa’s sub-Saharan countries.
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